Mr Phillips puts his ear against the door of his son’s room and listens for a moment to the silence. Left to his own devices, Tom will never come downstairs before midday, and when he does so will wordlessly take a bowl of cornflakes and a cup of Nescafé from the kitchen to flop down in front of the television. If he is up before noon on Saturday he will turn on a pop music programme, which Mr Phillips secretly likes to watch, because the videos often have erotic content in the form of writhing girls. I know what they’re doing but I don’t understand why they’re trying to do it standing up, as the old buffers used once to say. He can however tell that his presence has a suffocating effect on Tom. Perhaps his son’s motive for watching the programme is sufficiently close to his own to make the moment embarrassingly intimate; or perhaps watching anything to do with sex in the company of our parents is to some extent the same as watching our parents have sex. Last Saturday, two days before, Mr Phillips went downstairs to find Tom watching a video which, to the sound of the usual arrhythmical crashing and wailing, consisted of nothing more than a girl’s beautiful tea-coloured midriff, her navel pierced with a single thin band of gold, wiggling from side to side, up and down, a glimpse of low-slung skirt intermittently visible at the bottom of the shot, which was otherwise without distractions. Images which in Mr Phillips’s youth would have been considered pornographic are now everywhere, an accepted visual language; and all to the good, thinks Mr Phillips. Well done! On the back cover of the current issue of Vogue, for instance, an indulgence Mrs Phillips allows herself every few months, is a beautifully lavish black and white photograph of a woman’s bottom — and a very small bottle of perfume. Well done! Mr Phillips, standing, and Tom, lying, had watched the girl’s wiggling in embarrassed but rapt silence for ninety seconds until Mr Phillips had said:
‘That must hurt.’ — an attempted reference to the navel ring. Mr Phillips could hear the middle-agedness in his voice and hated it. Tom hadn’t even looked up at him, and he left the room.
Sometimes an image from a telly programme, or from a woman seen in the street, or even a sexy memory that just popped up for no reason, will lodge in Mr Phillips’s mind like a splinter under a fingernail and stay there for weeks, so that he finds himself replaying it over and over again (the expression in the eyes of Sharon Mitchell, blank with lust, as she turned her head to look at him as he slid his cock into her from behind on her parents’ downstairs divan: a thirty year old memory that one day, as he was masturbating in the bath, popped up in front of his imagination like a projected slide). At the moment the image tormenting him is of Clarissa Colingford, surely not her real name, whom Mr Phillips had first seen on some show in which celebrities made fools of themselves for charity. She had been doing the locomotion, and something about the way she did it, mechanically precise in her choo-chooing motion, embarrassed but also abandoned, smiling and blushing at the same time, had snagged at Mr Phillips, so that he couldn’t stop thinking about her. It was something to do with the hinterland of life you could guess in her, the background life of getting out of bed in the morning, checking her answering machine messages, swearing when she stubbed her toe, popping out for cat food and dental floss, putting bank statements in the bin without opening them — you could picture her doing all these things in the same busy, preoccupied, sexily absent-minded way. Mr Phillips could tell they would like each other if they met. She was the sort of person you could tell at say a fourth meeting that you’d had a dream about them, or even, conceivably, if you really were getting on, that you’d had a crush on them for ages. Mr Phillips has to admit that he would be capable of making a fool of himself for Clarissa Colingford. And as chance would have it, just as Mr Phillips was becoming obsessed with her, so everyone else seemed to be too. She had caught the public imagination and suddenly there were appearances on panel games and tabloid stories about boyfriend trouble. She was famous in that pure, almost abstract, modern way, a celebrity. If you stopped someone in the street and asked if they had heard of Clarissa Colingford the answer would probably be Yes. If you asked what it was she was best known for, there would probably be a sticky pause. But the truth was, who needed to be known for anything when they could have Clarissa’s pure, blonde, above-it-all innocent sexiness?
1.5
On mornings when he leaves the house to go to work, Mr Phillips comes out of the front door and stops for a moment while he runs his eye over the trellis beside the bay window. Mrs Phillips’s climbers are struggling again. While he does this he surreptitiously checks the street for the presence of neighbours. Even though he basically gets on with most of them, thanks in no small part to the Wellesley Crescent Neighbourhood Watch Association, Mr Phillips nonetheless feels a small but vivid dislike of bumping into them at this point in the day, as they head off to work with closed, practical faces. The worst of them is the extraordinarily nosy Mr Palmer at number 42, known to the Phillips family as Norman the Noxious Neighbour. Mr Phillips’s mood lifts slightly whenever he sees that the coast is clear. Today there is no Norman but he does have to walk past Mr Morris at number 32, five doors down, as he stands in a track suit beside the open door of his big car.
‘Morning,’ says Mr Phillips.
‘Morning,’ says, or rather grunts, Mr Morris — evidently this isn’t his favourite ritual either. And it is a nice enough morning, for London anyway, already warm, the blue sky reasonably visible between chunky but fast moving, whiter-than-usual clouds.
The houses in the Crescent are low-squatting semi-detached Edwardian villas — a word which always gives Mr Phillips a mental glimpse of people in togas on the set of Up Pompeii. They look more cramped than they are, with decent space at the back and sometimes an attic too, as well as three upstairs bedrooms. If houses were faces the street would be a row of well-fed Tories, golfers, Gilbert and Sullivan enthusiasts. Now that Martin has left home their house has gone from near population overload to being eerily roomy, and Mr Phillips has taken over the loft (formerly Martin’s lair) as a study or den. From it he looks out over neighbours’ gardens and the roofscape towards the tower block about half a mile away. In his den he mostly studies second-hand car prices or reads one of his autobiographies.
At the end of the road Mr Phillips turns left again and heads down Middleton Way, today as on every work day. This street is used as a cut-through by cars trying to defeat the one-way system, even though so many drivers know the route that it’s just as clogged and congested as the official route — a typical London event, in a city where knowing the wrinkles and shortcuts only helps as long as not enough others know them too. Today the cars in the cut-through sit fuming and revving in the July warmth, the air already close and polluted. Mr Phillips watches the inhabitant of a dark blue L-reg Vauxhall Astra, a thirtyish man with a suit jacket hung in his offside rear window, pick his nose, consider the product of his excavation and then, with a decisive gourmandly air, eat it. Three cars in front, a woman in a VW Passat is leaning over and using the rear-view mirror to check between her front teeth.